# Identifying the Achilles' Heel: An Iterative Method for Dynamically Uncovering Factual Errors in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00761 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00761/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [Measuring and Improving Consistency in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01017/) (2021)
- [PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07033/) (2021)
- [Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10281/) (2019)
- [Beyond I.I.D.: Three Levels of Generalization for Question Answering on Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07743/) (2020)
- [Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models (LLMs)? A.K.A. Will LLMs Replace Knowledge Graphs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10168/) (2023)
- [Multilingual LAMA: Investigating Knowledge in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00894/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18486/) (2023)
- [KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03875/) (2020)
- [PyKEEN 1.0: A Python Library for Training and Evaluating Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14175/) (2020)
- [ChatGPT or Grammarly? Evaluating ChatGPT on Grammatical Error Correction Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13648/) (2023)
- [Can we trust the evaluation on ChatGPT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12767/) (2023)
- [Can Generative Pre-trained Language Models Serve as Knowledge Bases for Closed-book QA?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01561/) (2021)
- [ChatGPT versus Traditional Question Answering for Knowledge Graphs: Current Status and Future Directions Towards Knowledge Graph Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06466/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Can Knowledge Editing Really Correct Hallucinations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16251/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Memorization In Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02159/) (2024)
- [Metamorphic Testing of Large Language Models for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02108/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are foundational in various applications due to their extensive knowledge from pre-training and fine-tuning. Despite this, they are prone to generating factual and commonsense errors, raising concerns in critical areas like healthcare, journalism, and education to mislead users. Current methods for evaluating LLMs' veracity are limited by the need for extensive human labor, test data contamination, or limited scope, hindering efficient and effective exposure of errors. To address these challenges, we propose HalluHunter, a novel, fully automated framework for systematically uncovering factual inaccuracies in LLMs. HalluHunter employs a knowledge-graph-based approach, extracting fact triplets to generate diverse question types for single- and multi-hop reasoning using rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Its iterative process starts with random triplet selection for question generation, followed by adaptive selection in subsequent iterations, targeting triplets where LLMs frequently err based on their performance analysis. Our extensive tests on nine prominent LLMs reveal that HalluHunter can trigger factual errors in up to 55% of tested questions. Moreover, we demonstrate that HalluHunter's test cases, particularly in adaptive selection, could further expose the weaknesses in benchmarking the factuality in LLMs meanwhile maintaining the coverage of questions. All code, data, and results are available at this link: https://github.com/Mysterchan/HalluHunter.